


Begin Again

by ReaperWriter



Series: CS AU Week [7]
Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Captain Swan AU Week, F/M, Parallel Lives, belated
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-07
Updated: 2014-07-07
Packaged: 2018-02-07 21:16:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,773
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1914135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ReaperWriter/pseuds/ReaperWriter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In every ending, there is a new beginning.... </p><p>Killian Jones and Emma Swan meet time after time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Begin Again

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the last day of the Captain Swan AU Week challenge...slightly belated. This was a wild card day, and my muse seems to have taken that literally.
> 
> Thanks always to Adam and Eddy for creating the world. And to Jennifer Morrison and Colin O'Donoghue for bringing these people to life.

They meet in the villa of the Emperor. She is the orphan daughter of the Emperor’s cousin, the ward he loves like his own child. He is a general, the Emperor’s favorite. Her hair shimmers in the lamp light like spun gold, and her eyes shine like pale emeralds. His sparkle like Baiae’s waters on a hot someday and he smells like leather and the sea. The world stops around them when his touch brushes her arm.

He loses a hand in the emperor’s service, but wins the right to hers in return. They wed in solemnity and make love with abandon, and have five good years together before the gods rain fire down on the Villa they are visiting in Pompeii. They die in each other’s arms.

****

They come from different tribes, and meet for the first time on the mountain. She is the daughter of a shepherd and helps with the animals. He was a soldier, once, and then one of the assassins, and he has darkness in his soul. It lightens with her smile and her long gold hair across his chest when he holds her tight in his arms. Her eyes are the green of the plants that grow for a brief time in the spring rains. His eyes are like the clear desert sky.

They have less than six months before the ends comes. One of the ten, he finds her waiting in their place for him. He has the blood of a hundred already marring his skin when he pulls her to him, kissing her goodbye one last time. His blade is quick across her throat, and she is gone before she sinks to the ground. It burns hot as it slides in between his ribs, his blood and hers combined. He crawls to her, and when the conquerors come, they find her in his arms.

****

She is the daughter of an ealdorman when the Vikings come, bringing death and fear. She is fighting and scratching at a man who is trying to take her by force when a voice calls out, stopping him, and then she is the Chieftain’s woman. She hates him, oh how she hates him, with his hair dark as night and his eyes like the blue summer skies, salt crusted on his skin.

He doesn’t force her, instead keeping her safe and sound, and slowly, she learns his language and he hers. And he tells her stories of his raids and his gods and his people. And one night, she comes to him in his bed, her gold hair falling down around shoulders, and he treats her like his precious treasure. And she doesn’t hate him anymore.

She dies giving him their third son, and he keens over her grave for days. Within the year, he falls in the shieldwall, a braid of golden hair gripped in his hand with his sword.

****

She is given to him as the spoils of war, this condottieri who barely speaks their language, but who is the favorite of the Duke. She expects him to be rough and hard as warriors are, expects him to use her to breed him sons until she is used up and dead. Instead, he comes to her gently, his blue eyes sparkling like sapphires, smelling of leather and horses and his skin tasting of salt. He touches her like she is fine and precious, and as they kneel in the church, he is solemn.

He watches his beautiful wife, when he is home, as she laughs and dances and sings. Her hair, so much gold under her veils, is his to unwrap and run his hands through. Her eyes sparkle green like the hills of his homeland and seem to burn like fire when he caresses her in their marriage bed. He loves her in ways he never expected, deeply and with reverence.

He loses her and their babe to childbirth and he buries her in a marble tomb fit for a princess. And after, he is reckless in the field, charging ahead like a madman. When a spear catches him through the heart, no one calls it suicide aloud, but everyone knows the truth. They bury him beside her.

****

She meets him in the King’s court. He is one of His Majesty’s favorites, merry and madcap, willing to tilt in the lists or on the dance floor, or to follow along on another folly to France. His blue eyes, matched with his velvet doublet, his hair dark like sin. She’s lady in waiting to the current Queen, when she isn’t busy dodging the King’s advances (because she isn’t a fool and no chance to become Queen is worth her life).

He woos her with words and pretty songs on his lute, and she resists mightily for a long time, the hind ahead of the hunter. When she finally succumbs, it is with the knowledge that this is no rude dalliance, and indeed, he goes to the King to beg his help with her father. Her hair looks gilt in the diffuse light of the chapel, and the ring he gives her has a small green stone like her eyes.

They spend two good years loving each other, with a fine son to show, when the sweat come again to London town and carries all three of them away.

****

He sees her across the crowded tavern, laughing with the man with brown hair and brown eyes, and what strikes him is that the smile on her face doesn’t meet her bright green eyes. Later, when the man has passed out in the corner, he finds her and buys her ale, and they sit by the fire, and he tells her tales of the sea.

She falls into his eyes, bluer than she’s ever seen, and into his stories, and into his arms and his bed, and together they find joy and peace for a night. In the gloaming of the morning, he swears to her he will return in a year’s time, will come for her and take her with him, and they will sail far, far away.

She watches, and waits for him from day to day, her belly growing bigger and the talk growing louder. Her little raven haired, blue eyed daughter has started to toddle when word comes of a wreck and the loss of all hands. And so she marries the brown eyed man.

Three years later, when he finally comes back, battered and bruised, missing a hand and so much of himself, he finds her in the church yard with another man’s name, and the words “Beloved Mother.” And in the streets near the tavern, he meets a wee girl with his coloring and her smile.

****

He came to fight her people, to stand for King and Country, believing they were right to oppose these damned colonials. Until he met her. She’s fiery and fierce like the sun, her hair golden and her eyes like green flame, and her words, burning into him, and changing his very soul. She is an alchemist, a sorceress, an angel of the lord. And so he deserts, and comes to their side.

She trusts him not at all in the beginning, but he is nothing if not a patient man, showing her with deeds as well as words that he will stand with her and with them, lay his life down if she asks him. That he is a true convert to the cause. They fall together one quiet, cold winter night in the barn they are sheltering in, and he fears the straw will blaze around them with the heat of their passions.

They are caught in 1780 and tried quickly before the commander of the company as spies. As they are led to the gallows, he pleads that she might live until she hushes him. She only asks that they might hold hands as they go. He kisses her once, deeply, before the ladders are kicked out, and then they feel nothing at all. Their friends come in the night and steal their bodies, burying them side by side.

****

She hates these sort of parties, especially now, with a war on, and she wishes to escape the ballroom, until her eyes are caught by blue, bluer than his uniform, bluer than the sky, piercing, piercing blue. They seemed to light up, and he made his way toward her, smiling. She sees the look of scandal when he introduces himself, rather than finding someone to introduce him. His voice is smooth and accented, and he is clearly disreputable. She approves.

He finds himself drawn to the green eyes of the woman, the tamped down fire in her, her gold hair shining above her widow’s black. He knows it will be the talk of Boston, when he breaks protocol to speak to her, but he’s just an immigrant boy made very good, and to hell with what they say. They spend a whirlwind two weeks, picnics and dances and balls. Two days before his unit is to leave and head south, they sneak away quietly and wed. Her family is appalled, but she won’t be moved.

She writes him like it’s a religion, and he answers like its breathing, until the day the letters stop and she is summoned to the troop hospital in Washington. He’s a different man, his left hand gone, and he’s angry and defiant, and he pushes away everyone until she walks up to his bed and slaps him, hard. It’s like waking from a long nightmare, and by the time she gets him home, they’ve found their joy again.

They get thirty years and some, and she goes with him to his unit reunions so their sons can meet his brothers in everything but blood.

****

He rides up to the ranch one day, and it’s unexpected. She’s been alone a few years with her boy and has eked by a living, but it’s gotten harder and harder and she would have been long gone if there was anywhere else to go. But when she had bought the dream her dead husband was selling, she cut all ties, and now she’s bound to this land.

His eyes are blue like the prairie sky, and his left hand is gone, from what she doesn’t know, but he doesn’t seem to miss it. He stays in the barn and manages the plow and the oxen, fixes the leak in the roof and the broken door on her chicken coop, and doesn’t comment on her pants. Together they bring the herd out to the range and then back in. He teaches her boy how to rope and how to track a deer. She teaches him how to read.

He likes that she’s strong, and fierce, and likes her boy, who’s smart and kind and has faith in everything. Likes that her hair looks like a wheat field in high fall, and her eyes like sky before a storm. He’s been there six months when she makes him move in by the fire lest he freeze to death. He’s been there a year when he kisses her, soft and slow, after the boy has gone to sleep and they’re sitting up by the fire, her mending his shirt, him splicing some rope. It’s another three months before they stand up in the little church a town over and say words. The boy asks if he can call him pa.

They have three more children and twenty three years before an illness takes her. They bury her under the tree in the back pasture, and within a year he’s beside her.

****

He wakes up in the back of an ambulance racing away from the front to green eyes that are competent as hell and a tight braid of gold hair, jabbing a syringe of morphine in his arm. It is perhaps for the best that he doesn’t look down, too busy being convinced that his prayers were answered and that an angel had come to lead him home. He passes out again shortly after.

She doesn’t know what possesses her to come find him later in hospital. She has leave coming and it’s been a while, but that still doesn’t explain why his face, his deep blue eyes, haunts her dreams in the fraught periods of sleep she gets.

He’s starring out the window when she walks up, the stump of his arm covered in bandages. He turns at her footsteps, and his eyes go wide. “You’re real.” She laughs at him and sits down opposite him.

“I’m Emma.”

She manages to survive the shell that narrowly misses her ambulance, and he makes it through a round of influenza as the bells of peace peel over the land. Both orphans, they marry quietly, and live their lives. They die together, instantly, on the first night of the blitz.

****

She meets him in a tent somewhere between Seoul and the DMZ, her hair up in a messy bun, her hand clenched in his right one as he fights through the pain. “I’m the luckiest man in Korea, love,” he says. “How many other guys get to spend a day with someone as lovely as you?”

“True enough, Lieutenant.” She swabs his brow with her other hand. There had been nothing that the surgeons could do for him, the damage too much. It was all morphine and a hand to hold now.

“Killian,” he said. “My name is Killian.”

“I’m Emma,” she replied, and he smiled, his blue eyes lighting up.

“Be my girl, Emma?” he asked, and she noticed the little trickle of blood at the corner of his mouth. She’d been nursing in the army for ten years, but now, her heart wrenched painfully.

She nodded, and leaned over, pressing a kiss to his lips. When she pulled away, his eyes had dimmed, and he was gone. She carefully pulled the clenched fingers away, and took his dog tags. The one went with the triage report for the burial service to take and transport. But the other went into her pocket, and throughout the rest of the war, her own fingers found it and remembered blue eyes and a smile that made him look impossibly young.

Three weeks before the war ended, her jeep hit a landmine, and she was gone.

****

He met her in philosophy class, where she liked to argue. He thought he could listen to her argue all day long. She wore her pretty blonde hair strait and long, with peasant shirts and bell bottom pants, and he loves her eyes, so very, very green.

He buys her coffee, and she can’t stop starring at his blue eyes. He’s a year older than her, and he’ll graduate soon, and his deferment will end, and it’s terrifying. She writes their congressman, and makes love to him often, and tries to talk him into medical school, which is ridiculous because he’s got the soul of a poet. And so they go to the protest that day, on the campus green, and it gets out of hand, and suddenly there is gunfire.

Her shirt is turning slowly red and he can’t hear her for the screaming; only the screaming is him. Her hand touches his face and she mouths “I love…” and then the fire in her eyes is just gone.

He quits school and enlists, and is gone before any of his friends can stop him. He’s the only person they know who commits suicide by war.

****

They meet on a dating site, and she hates that that is their story. He humors her, lying in bed together and inventing better tales. She got his drink by accident at Starbucks. He missed his train and ended up on the later one with her. She tripped over him playing Frisbee in the park. But it always ends the same. She falls in love with his deep blue eyes and his steadfast belief in her. He falls for her long golden hair and her fire.

They’re together for ten years and all over the globe, him reporting, her writing travel books, living in Rome and Cairo, Shanghai and Sydney, Sao Paulo and Quebec. As the plane they're on jerks, she takes his hand like she has a million times and he smiles at her, and in a brief blinding flash, they’re gone.

****

She finds him alive, the only survivor, under a pile of bodies in an ogre wrecked village. She knows without a doubt that he’s lying to them, but something about his eyes, blue as the ocean, is achingly familiar.


End file.
